Elizabeth Blackwell: The Prank Vote That Made America's First Woman MD

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Elizabeth Blackwell was born in Bristol, England, in 1821 to Samuel Blackwell, a sugar refiner so opposed to slavery that his children boycotted cane sugar. After the refinery burned in 1832 the family emigrated and settled in Cincinnati, and when Samuel died a few years later the Blackwell daughters opened a school to survive. Blackwell found the human body repulsive as a teenager, but a dying friend told her she would have suffered less with a female doctor. She taught herself medicine from the libraries of sympathetic doctors in the Carolinas, was rejected by every major school in Philadelphia and New York, and in 1847 was admitted to Geneva Medical College after the faculty let 150 male students vote, expecting a no. The students voted yes, thinking it was a prank by a rival school. She graduated at the top of her class in 1849 as the first female MD in America.

In Paris she was admitted to La Maternité only as a student midwife, and in late 1849 fluid from an infant with purulent ophthalmia splashed into her left eye. She lost the eye, and with it her hope of a surgical career. Back in New York no one would rent her office space, so in 1857 she founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children with her sister Emily Blackwell and Marie Zakrzewska. She clashed with the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, broke with Emily and with Florence Nightingale, and moved to Britain in 1869. Late in life she opposed vaccination and vivisection and doubted germ theory. She died in England in 1910 after a fall and a stroke.

• Misbehaving Blackwell children had their offenses written in a ledger called the Black Book and were sent to the attic at dinnertime.
• She quit a teaching job in Henderson, Kentucky, after one term because she could not bear seeing slavery firsthand.
• Her Geneva thesis on typhus drew on clinical work in the typhus and syphilis wards of the Blockley Almshouse in Philadelphia.
• The dean who had not wanted her admitted bowed to her as he conferred her degree.
• She raised an Irish orphan, Kitty Barry, as half servant and half daughter, keeping her as a lifelong companion.